Resistance by the colonized
The total violence of colonization in Algeria, Palestine, or Kanaky is therefore physical and symbolic, economic and cultural, political and social, religious and civil. It is literally a matter of substituting one society for another, replacing one people with another, destroying a history to justify an illegitimate present. The victims of these colonizations therefore have only one choice: to resist or disappear. To date, there is no example in human history of a people choosing to disappear. Resistance is inevitable and takes many different and evolving forms.
Fanon brilliantly describes the changing forms of resistance as colonial rule takes hold over the colonized society. The first forms of resistance are logically dependent on the social and economic structures that existed before colonization. They are therefore agrarian and tribal, communal and local, insurrectionary and guerrilla in nature. Two eras of human history clash militarily, two models of collective identity [tribal and tribal confederation for the colonized, nation-state for the colonizers], two types of military technology, two conceptions of war. Despite the imbalance of forces, this primary resistance of a society that refuses to disappear and that focuses all its energies on survival will have a lasting impact on colonized peoples. Admittedly, the military superiority of the colonizer led to the imposition of colonization, but the sense of dignity became deeply rooted and was passed down from generation to generation.
In Algeria, as in Kanaky, the transmission of the history of resistance to conquest and then colonization was the subjective foundation on which subsequent resumptions of the anti-colonial struggle were built. Memory is thus an important form of resistance, explains Frantz Fanon: “The memory of the anti-colonial period remains vivid in the villages. Women still whisper in their children’s ears the songs that accompanied the warriors who resisted the conquest. At the age of 12 or 13, the young villagers know the names of the old people who took part in the last uprising, and the dreams in the douars [… are] dreams of identification with this or that fighter, whose heroic death still provokes abundant tears today[23] . The book by Alban Bensa, Kacué Yvon Goromoedo, and Adrian Muckle, Les Sanglots de l’aigle pêcheur. Nouvelle-Calédonie : La guerre Kanak de 1917 (The Sobs of the Fisher Eagle: New Caledonia: The Kanak War of 1917), highlights the same mobilization of transmission and memory as a tool of resistance. “Defeated by arms, decimated, scattered, and yet still there, they entrusted words and writing with the task of preserving the memory of that time,” states the back cover[24] . In Algeria, as in Kanaky, storytelling, song, poetry, and legends were the springs of survival in the face of the steamroller of colonization.
Another transformation of resistance described by Fanon concerns the dimensions of identity. These are the site of a dual movement: rooting and broadening. Rooting, first of all, because the colonized perceive the danger of disappearance and react by immersing themselves totally in everything that makes up their historical personality, their cultural specificity, their social, religious, and civilizational differences. Almost instinctively, they retreat into their values, their ancestors, their religion, etc., in order to maintain their existence in the face of multifaceted genocide. For women, wearing the veil becomes an act of resistance, as does fleeing all contact with the colonizer and their institutions, returning to the djemaas[25] , and even religiosity itself. Explaining the colonizer’s determination to unveil Algerian women, Fanon explains: “The [colonial] administration states: ‘If we want to strike Algerian society at its core, in its capacity for resistance, we must first conquer the women; we must seek them out behind the veil where they hide and in the houses where men hide them[26] .”
The same logic of anchoring oneself in custom and tradition as a form of resistance and survival can be found today in the functioning of the FLNKS[27] (Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front), for example. To the great incomprehension of many Western activists, the appointment of delegates to various bodies raises, among other things, the question of respect for custom. Anthropologist Isabelle Leblic recalls that during a mini-congress in the central-southern region, the delegates responsible for defining the criteria for the appointment of candidates for regional elections settled on the following choice: “being an active activist, having a good knowledge of custom and being well integrated into it, being able to defend the positions of the FLNKS, being representative of one’s region, and respecting the non-accumulation of mandates.” Describing the start of various meetings, she explains the unavoidable nature of the moment of ‘custom’: “It is custom, the moment of custom. In the empty space in the middle of our circle, there were piles of cigarettes, “tabacs-bâtons ,” sticks of tobacco, raw and compact, a few CFP franc notes, and above all manus, those long, thin pieces of cloth that symbolize the bonds between human beings. All these objects were brought by each of us. They are a sign of the respect we owe to each other and to this land, the land of the valley that welcomes us[28] .
This first change in identity, that of putting down roots, was followed by a second, that of broadening one’s image of oneself and the group to which one belongs. Very quickly, the colonized in a settlement colonization became aware of the impossibility of lasting resistance on the basis of the tribe or even the tribal confederation. Faced with the colonizer, the process of national identification, which already existed to varying degrees depending on the country, inevitably accelerated. Frantz Fanon summarizes the process as follows: “The mobilization of the masses […] introduces into each consciousness the notion of a common cause, a national destiny, a collective history.” Similarly, in her description of the use of custom in the political life of the FLNKS, Isabelle Leblic mentions a difference with the mobilization of the same custom in everyday life: “The only notable difference between the two types of gathering lies in the fact that for political gatherings, the ‘customs of arrival’ most often end with the raising of the Kanaky flag[30] . Forms of resistance thus shift from the tribe to nationality while remaining rooted in specific popular history. The question of mobilizing armed struggle stems both from the realization that so-called “peaceful” struggle is ineffective and from the balance of power.
We emphasize these changes in identity and the work of transmitting resistance, because they constitute a subjective heritage on which subsequent resistance movements are based. They make the latter inevitable. There is no third alternative to settler colonization: either colonialism is destroyed, or the colonized people disappear. The contradiction is entirely antagonistic, as Frantz Fanon concluded: ” On the level of reasoning, the Manichaeism of the colonizer produces a Manichaeism of the colonized. The theory of the ‘absolutely evil native’ is matched by the theory of the ‘absolutely evil colonizer. “The appearance of the colonizer signified syncretically the death of indigenous society, cultural lethargy, and the petrification of individuals. For the colonized, life can only arise from the decomposing corpse of the colonizer[31] .”
The peasantry as centrality
The countryside and villages are the essential location for the processes described above. Essentially agrarian and communal societies, countries that have been and/or are victims of settlement colonization feel its destructive impact first in the countryside, where the vast majority of the population lives. What Algerian geographer Djilali Sari called “the dispossession of the fellah[32] ” and Algerian filmmaker Lamine Merbah called “the uprooted[33] ,” takes the form of massive land theft through colonization and, with it, the destruction of the material foundations of peasant collective life. In Algeria, as in Kanaky, the colonial question begins with the question of land. Frantz Fanon concludes that the peasantry plays a decisive role in the anti-colonial struggle, that it is at its core. “It is clear that, in colonial countries, only the peasantry is revolutionary. They have nothing to lose and everything to gain[34] ,“ explains Fanon, describing the attitude of these rural masses towards colonization: ”The rural masses have never ceased to pose the problem of their liberation in terms of violence, of land to be taken back from foreigners, of national struggle, of armed insurrection. It’s all very simple[35] .”
In Kanaky, too, the peasantry is the primary social base of the independence movement. Nearly 70% of the country’s Melanesian population lives in rural areas. Colonial land theft has led to a steady decline in Kanak subsistence agriculture in the national agricultural production. “More than 80% of New Caledonia’s agricultural production is carried out by European farmers located in the south of the archipelago, in the peri-urban ‘green belt’ of Nouméa,” summarized sociologist Marcel Djama in 1999. One of the colors of the Kanak flag, green, symbolizes the rural roots of the independence movement. When it was created in 1984, the FLNKS explained the presence of green on the national flag as follows: “It is the color of the plant kingdom and living waters. It represents ‘green pastures,’ food, the peasantry, and the rural world. It is the color of the awakening of nature, the awakening of life, of hope, of remedies. It is the emblem of salvation[37] .”
It is also the peasant origin of the urban “lumpen proletariat” that led Frantz Fanon to consider it as having significant revolutionary potential, making it the “urban spearhead” of the struggle. These peasants, driven from their land, accumulate in the urban peripheries without being able to find any professional employment due to their dependence on colonial capitalism. Agricultural overpopulation did not transform itself en masse into a proletariat, but into a “lumpenproletariat”: “The men whom the growing rural population and colonial expropriation have driven from their family lands wander tirelessly around the various cities, hoping that one day they will be allowed to enter. It is in this mass, in this people of the slums, within the lumpenproletariat, that the insurrection will find its urban spearhead. The lumpenproletariat is one of the most spontaneous and radical revolutionary forces of a colonized people[38] .
The situation is not much different in contemporary Kanaky. The rural exodus to Nouméa has led to the accumulation of a poor Kanak population, and among them a lumpenproletariat. Thousands of Kanak inhabitants of Nouméa now live in shacks on public land in the capital. These “squatters” survive by scavenging and subsistence farming. Unsurprisingly, these Nouméa ‘squats’ were important areas of mobilization during the uprising that shook Kanaky from May 2024 onwards. The board of directors of the Oceanist Society described the situation during these popular revolts as follows: ” Many of those now described as rioters come from marginalized and excluded populations composed mainly of Kanaks and other Oceanic peoples. These poor populations, which also include a lumpen proletariat, emerged with the massive urbanization of Greater Nouméa over the last thirty years. They are the forgotten and shipwrecked victims of the Matignon and Nouméa agreements. How many of them would have stayed, or even returned, to their villages if they had been able to find the means to live there in decent conditions? They too must now be considered full citizens[39] .”
This interpretation of the class structure of the settlement colonies is, of course, a political stance against a dogmatic interpretation of Marxism that seeks to find the social base and offensive base of the national liberation struggle in an embryonic proletariat. Fanon even considers that this proletariat, which is weakly developed due to the very nature of colonial capitalism, has a social position that is incomparable to that of other components of the colonized people: “In colonial territories, the proletariat is the core of the colonized people most favored by the colonial regime. The embryonic proletariat in the cities is relatively privileged. In capitalist countries, the proletariat has nothing to lose; it is the class that has everything to gain. In colonial countries, the proletariat has everything to lose. It represents the fraction of the colonized people that is necessary and irreplaceable for the smooth running of the colonial machine[40] .”
Some have interpreted Fanon’s analysis as a total rejection of the Marxist approach, whereas his entire argument aims to emphasize the importance of taking into account the specificities of colonial capitalism [dependent and extroverted to serve the interests of the metropolitan economy] in order to understand colonization by settlement. Moreover, Fanon is not the only thinker on national liberation to have reached this conclusion. Amilcar Cabral, for example, believed that he had initially dogmatically applied European models, which led the independence movement to a dramatic impasse. This courageous self-criticism led him, like Fanon, to advocate a central role for the peasantry in the national liberation struggle: “I cannot claim to organize a party, or a struggle based on my ideas. I must do so based on the concrete reality of the country. [|…] At the beginning of our struggle, for example, we were convinced that if we managed to mobilize the workers of Bissau, Bolama, and Bafata to go on strike and demonstrate in the streets, the Portuguese would change and give us independence. That was wrong. First of all, in our country, wage workers are not as powerful as in other countries. From an economic point of view, salaried workers are not a sufficient force; in fact, in our country, the great economic force lies in the countryside[41] .
The ambiguities and contradictions of the petty bourgeoisie
Fanon died too soon to witness the independence of Algeria, for which he fought so hard. However, he did witness the first African national independence movements and with them the rise of the national petty bourgeoisie, which was often at the head of the independence organizations. As roving ambassador for the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (GPRA) for Africa from the spring of 1960, he had the opportunity to observe at close quarters the first steps of independence in countries ranging from Congo to Senegal, Liberia to Guinea, and Mali to Ghana. Bitterly, he noted the complicity of certain African countries in the isolation and assassination of Lumumba: “The great success of Africa’s enemies is to have compromised Africans themselves. It is true that these Africans had a direct interest in Lumumba’s murder. They were puppet heads of government, within a puppet independence, confronted day after day with massive opposition from their peoples[42] . “
For Fanon, African complicity in the Congolese tragedy confirmed his observations in several African countries that independence had been confiscated by the establishment of a new age of colonialism, indirect colonialism, colonialism through the mediation of African elites who became managers of the interests of the former colonizer, neocolonialism. The expectations and hopes of the people invested in independence began to be disappointed from the very first steps of the new governments: “Discontented workers are subjected to repression as ruthless as that of the colonial periods. Trade unions and political parties are confined to quasi-clandestinity. The people, the people who had given everything in the difficult hours of the national liberation struggle, are now wondering, with empty hands and empty stomachs, how real their victory really is[43] . “
To understand the sequence of independence, it is necessary to distinguish, as we have said before, between independence and decolonization. It was precisely to avoid genuine decolonization that certain African independence movements were abruptly promoted after 1956 by the French colonizer. A decade earlier, at the Brazzaville Conference in February 1944, the latter had stated that “the ends of the civilizing work accomplished by France in the colonies rule out any idea of autonomy, any possibility of evolution outside the French Empire; the eventual, even distant, establishment of self-government in the colonies is to be ruled out.” In an attempt to eliminate any hope of independence, massive repression followed. This was the case on May 8, 1945, in Algeria, in Vietnam in September 1945, and in Cameroon in 1947. A little over a decade later, it was Paris that defended the idea of autonomy from 1956 and then independence from 1958 for the colonies of French West Africa (AOF) and French Equatorial Africa (AEF). Between these two historical periods came the victory of the Vietnamese independence movement at Dien Ben Phu, the outbreak of armed struggle in Algeria and Cameroon, the Bandung Conference, and the Anglo-French-Israeli defeat in Egypt during the nationalization of the Suez Canal. Fear of the radicalization of national liberation struggles led the colonizers to change tactics in order to maintain their hold and promote formal independence, constrained by economic and military agreements that reproduced colonial dependence under a new guise.
Describing these “puppet” independences, Fanon compared them as early as 1958 to real independence, that is, independence that goes as far as true decolonization: “True liberation is not this pseudo-independence where ministers with limited responsibility coexist with an economy dominated by the colonial pact. Liberation is the death of the colonial system, from the preeminence of the language of the oppressor and departmentalization to the customs union that in reality keeps the colonized in the grip of colonialist culture, fashion, and images[45] . Note the reference to “departmentalization,” indicating that Fanon was not fooled by the new colonial discourse of 1946 on the “four old colonies” of Guadeloupe, Martinique, Réunion, and French Guiana, which would later be expanded to include Kanaky and Polynesia. He, who was so inspired by the work of Césaire, distinguished himself from him by rejecting the “realism” that led the latter to accept the logic of departmentalization in place of the goal of national independence.
Three years later, in his masterpiece, The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon offers us a veritable autopsy of these “puppet” independences. He defined the class nature of the new leaders of these “puppet” states: “The national bourgeoisie that takes power at the end of the colonial regime […] has the psychology of businessmen, not captains of industry. And it is quite true that the rapacity of the colonists and the embargo system set up by colonialism left them little choice[46] .He describes the type of economy that such a class implements once in power: “The national economy of the independence period is not reoriented. It is still about harvesting peanuts, harvesting cocoa, harvesting olives. […] No industry is established in the country. We continue to ship raw materials, we continue to be Europe’s small farmers, specialists in raw products[47] .“ He characterizes the social and political function of the new leaders politically, namely to serve as intermediaries and business agents: ”The national bourgeoisie has discovered its historic mission to serve as an intermediary. As we can see, it is not a vocation to transform the nation, but prosaically to serve as a transmission belt for a capitalism cornered into camouflage and now adorned with the mask of neocolonialism. The national bourgeoisie will revel, without complex and with dignity, in the role of business agent for the Western bourgeoisie[48] .”
The concrete reality has proved Fanon right in many African countries. Independence has often been a rush to grab the colonists’ assets. Wealth has accumulated in a matter of months. It has then been considerably increased by accumulation in the shadow of the state apparatus. In short, the process of crystallization of social classes, previously all suppressed by colonialism, suddenly accelerated, giving rise to a comprador bourgeoisie and a class of large landowners. Unlike Fanon, we characterize the social strata installed in power by the colonizer as predominantly petty bourgeoisie and, at best, middle bourgeoisie for landowners. The process of neo-colonization is, in our view, precisely constituted by the transformation of these social strata into comprador social classes [commercial and agrarian].
Fanon draws political conclusions from this process by warning about the nature of nationalist organizations, their programs, and their social bases. He emphasizes that there is no possibility of independent capitalism for the former colonies. The petty bourgeoisie engaged in the national liberation struggle must choose between betraying their ideals and betraying their class interests: “In an underdeveloped country, an authentic national bourgeoisie must make it its imperative duty to betray the vocation to which it was destined, to put itself at the school of the people, that is, to place at the disposal of the people the intellectual and technical capital it wrested during its passage through the colonial universities[49] . Such “betrayal” does not happen spontaneously. It can only be the result of a democratic political organization with a program and a social base in the popular classes [peasantry and working class] and establishing grassroots control over its leaders.
Amilcar Cabral came to the same conclusion in his thesis on the “suicide of the petty bourgeoisie” presented at the Tricontinental Conference in Havana in 1966: ” In order not to betray its objectives, the petty bourgeoisie has only one path: to strengthen its revolutionary consciousness, repudiate attempts at gentrification and the natural solicitations of its class mentality, identify with the working classes, and not oppose the development of the revolutionary process. This means that in order to fulfill its role in the national liberation struggle, the revolutionary petty bourgeoisie must be capable of committing class suicide in order to be reborn as revolutionary workers, fully identified with the deepest aspirations of the people to whom they belong. This alternative—betraying the revolution or committing class suicide—is the choice facing the petty bourgeoisie in the general context of national liberation
[50]. The colonizer does not remain inactive in the face of this choice. As independence approaches, it multiplies openings, bureaucratic bodies, commissions, sinecures, etc., with the aim of bureaucratizing the independence political organizations and orienting them toward neocolonialism.
In Kanaky today, there is a juxtaposition of the institutionalization and bureaucratization of a significant section of the petty bourgeoisie and the radicalization of the popular movement. The lessons of Fanon and Cabral sound like a warning and a call for vigilance.
The centenary of the birth of Lumumba, Malcolm, Fanon, and Cabral comes at a time when the anti-colonial struggle is resurgent [as evidenced by France’s troubles in West Africa and the October 7 operation in Palestine] and imperialist aggression is on the rise, with wars breaking out in Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, and elsewhere. In this context, Fanon’s message is marked by an undeniable modernity. Whether on the nature of colonial oppression, its links with capitalism and imperialism, the resistance it inevitably provokes, the attitude of different classes and social strata towards it, the link between independence and decolonization, that between decolonization and socialism, the possible dead ends and contradictions of national liberation struggles, etc., Fanon remains essential reading for anyone who wants to dismantle the colonial system that persists by constantly donning new masks. As long as our world remains structured around a dominant imperialist center and dominated peripheries, Fanon, Cabral, Malcolm, and Lumumba will remain relevant.
Said Bouamama is a French Algerian sociologist and activist who is the author of over a dozen books, his latest, Manual on Immigration (2021), For a Revolutionary Panafricanism (2023) Strategic Manual on Palestine and the Middle East (2024) among others.
[1] Born in Martinique, F Fanon was legally French by birth. By joining the FLN, he symbolically and politically rejected this nationality of birth. In his writings, he expresses himself as an Algerian. For example, in Year V of the Algerian Revolution, he writes: “What we Algerians want,” “our struggle,” “our cause,” and “our Revolution.” Having died before independence, he was never officially granted Algerian nationality. However, he was a representative of the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (GPRA), which indicates that he was considered Algerian by the authorities of the new state.
[2] Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme, Paris, Présence africaine, 2004, p. 9.
[3] Jean-Paul Sartre, “Le colonialisme est un système,” speech at a meeting “for peace in Algeria,” Les temps modernes, no. 123, March-April 1956.
[4] Amilcar Cabral, Foundations and Objectives of National Liberation and Social Structures, Speech at the First Conference of Solidarity with the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, Havana, January 3–12, 1966, in Unité et Lutte, Maspero, Paris, 1980, p. 161.
[5] Samir Amin, Unequal Development: An Essay on the Social Formations of Peripheral Capitalism, Minuit, Paris, 1973.
[6] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, in Œuvres, La Découverte, Paris, 2011, p. 455.
[7] Amilcar Cabral, Fondements et objectifs de la libération nationale et structures sociales, op. cit., p. 159.
[8] Ibid., p. 159.
[9] Ali Moussa Iye and Khadija Touré (eds.), Histoire de l’humanité, volume 6, UNESCO, Paris, 2008, p. 1388.
[10] Melanesia includes Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Kanaky, and the Fiji Islands. The term Kanak refers to the Melanesian population of Kanaky.
[11] Jean-Louis Rallu, La population de la Nouvelle-Calédonie, Revue Population, 1985, no. 4-5, p. 725.
[12] Kamel Kateb, Européens, « indigènes » et juifs en Algérie (1830-1962). Représentations et réalités des populations, INED, Paris, 2002, pp. 16 and 47.
[13] Djilali Sari, Le désastre démographique, SNED, Algiers, 1982, p. 130.
[14] Jean Guiart, Bantoustans en Nouvelle-Calédonie, Droit et Liberté, no. 371, July-August 1978, p. 14.
[15] Alain Ruscio, La première guerre d’Algérie. Une histoire de conquête et de résistance, La Découverte, Paris, 2024, p. 394.
[16] Charles-André Julien, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine, volume 1, PUF, Paris, 1964, p. 250.
[17] Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme, Présence Africaine, Paris, (1955) 2004, pp. 13-14.
[18] Frantz Fanon, Why We Use Violence, Speech given at the Accra Conference, April 1960, in Year V of the Algerian Revolution, Complete Works, op. cit., pp. 413 and 418.
[19] Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, Fayard, Paris, 1996, p. 647.
source: Saïd Bouamama’s blog